. Aren't those the Gretrys?"

This left Jadwin and Laura out of the conversation, and the capitalist
was quick to seize the chance of talking to her. Soon she was surprised
to notice that he was trying hard to be agreeable, and before they had
exchanged a dozen sentences, he had turned an awkward compliment. She
guessed by his manner that paying attention to young girls was for him
a thing altogether unusual. Intuitively she divined that she, on this,
the very first night of their acquaintance, had suddenly interested him.

She had had neither opportunity nor inclination to observe him closely
during their interview in the vestibule, but now, as she sat and
listened to him talk, she could not help being a little attracted. He
was a heavy-built man, would have made two of Corthell, and his hands
were large and broad, the hands of a man of affairs, who knew how to
grip, and, above all, how to hang on. Those broad, strong hands, and
keen, calm eyes would enfold and envelop a Purpose with tremendous
strength, and they would persist and persist and persist, unswerving,
unwavering, untiring, till the Purpose was driven home. And the two
long, lean, fibrous arms of him; what a reach they could attain, and
how wide and huge and even formidable would be their embrace of
affairs. One of those great manoeuvres of a fellow money-captain had
that very day been concluded, the Helmick failure, and between the
chords and bars of a famous opera men talked in excited whispers, and
one great leader lay at that very moment, broken and spent, fighting
with his last breath for bare existence. Jadwin had seen it all.
Uninvolved in the crash, he had none the less been close to it,
watching it, in touch with it, foreseeing each successive collapse by
which it reeled fatally to the final catastrophe. The voices of the two
men that had so annoyed her in the early part of the evening were
suddenly raised again:

"--It was terrific, there on the floor of the Board this morning. By
the Lord! they fought each other when the Bears began throwing the
grain at 'em--in carload lots."

And abruptly, midway between two phases of that music-drama, of passion
and romance, there came to Laura the swift and vivid impression of that
other drama that simultaneously--even at that very moment--was working
itself out close at hand, equally picturesque, equally romantic,
equally passionate; but more than that, real, actual, modern, a thing
in the very heart of t